the Mississippi. Westward toward the dark,
the undertown of scenes come back to, fright
riddling the structures of interior history:

Where is it? Where, in the shucked-off
bundle, the hampered obscurity that has been
for centuries the mumbling lot of women,

did the thread of fire, too frail
ever to discover what it meant, to risk
even the taking of a shape, relinquish

the seed of possibility, unguessed-at
as a dream of something precious? Memory,
that exquisite blunderer, stumbling

like a migrant bird that finds the flyway
it hardly knew it knew except by instinct,
down the long-unentered nave of childhood,

late on a midwinter afternoon, alone
among the snow-hung hollows of the windbreak
on the far side of the orchard, encounters

sheltering among the evergreens, a small
stilled bird, its cap of clear yellow
slit by a thread of scarlet  the untouched

nucleus of fire, the lost connection
hallowing the wizened effigy, the mother
curtained in Intensive Care: a Candlemas

of moving lights along Route 80, at nightfall,
in falling snow, the stillness and the sorrow
of things moving back to where they came from.

---
Footnotes from Helen Vendler's anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry

1Candlemas - February 2. Observed as a church festival
in commemoration of the presentation of Christ in the temple and the
purification of the Virgin Mary after childbirth.

2transhumance - transport of flocks

3Mosaic - of or related to Moses or the institutions or
writings attributed to him; here, the Mosaic law that forty days after
childbirth a woman must present herself at the temple for ritual
purification.

4Arlington - Arlington National Cemetery

5parturition - giving birth

6Brauron, Argos, Samons - Brauron was a site known from
ancient times for the worship of Artemis. Hera was worshipped at Argos.
Samos is an island in the Aegean Sea.

7Athene - Athena emerged, fully armed, from the head of
her father, Zeus.

8peplos - a linen shawl, cult symbol of Athena; object
of the Panathenaic procession in ancient Athens, represented on the
Parthenon.